Journey to Johannesburg

The Path to Johannesburg

In the 1960s, many people around the world began to face
critical environmental issues in their communities: forests were being
destroyed by acid rain, rivers poisoned beyond use by industrial wastes, cities
choked by pollution from automobiles and industry, rural farmers hit by
famines, and once-rich resource reserves wearing thin.

A few
scientists began to speak out about the global interconnectedness of these
problems, and they warned that we humans were quickly becoming victims of our
own success-that we now had the ability to entirely despoil the Earth that
sustains us.

In 1972, at
the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, delegates
from around the world came together to address these warnings. While the
conference produced a series of recommendations for government action,
environmental turmoil continued.

Twenty
years later, leading up to the U.N. Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the Royal
Society of London and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences-two of the world's
most prominent scientific bodies-issued a joint declaration calling for action.
"The future of our planet is in the balance. Sustainable development can be
achieved, but only if irreversible degradation of the environment can be halted
in time. The next 30 years may be crucial."

The scientific warnings have continued to grow in
severity and urgency, but progress on making change since the Stockholm
conference has remained painstakingly slow. And new international
challenges-terrorist attacks, military responses, and mounting tensions around
the world-have threatened to sidetrack the building momentum to address chronic
environmental problems. At the forthcoming Johannesburg World Summit,
environmentalists will aim to refocus the world on some of the most critical
threats to global security. That will mean seriously responding to
environmental tragedies and rapidly building on hard-won gains of the past four
decades, which are summarized in the following chronology.

World leaders will meet August 26 for the World
Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, to address once again, the multitude of
environmental threats destabilizing the planet. The question at the top of the
agenda: what progress have countries
made in the past 30 years to halt environmental hemorrhaging, and where will we
go from here?

1962 Marine biologist Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, calling attention to the
threat of toxic chemicals to people and the environment.

1967 The Torrey Canyon oil tanker hits ground and
spills 117,000 tons of oil into the North Sea around Cornwall in the United
Kingdom. The massive local pollution helps prompt legal changes to make ship
owners liable for all spills.

1968 Paul
Ehrlich publishes The Population Bomb,
describing the ecological threats of a rapidly growing population.

1968 Experts from around
the world meet for the first time at the U.N. Biosphere Conference to discuss
global environmental problems, including pollution, resource loss, and wetlands
destruction.

1970
The first Earth Day is held in the United States. Millions of people gather
around the country to demonstrate against environmental abuses, sparking the
creation of landmark environmental laws including the Endangered Species Act
and the Safe Drinking Water Act.

1971 2,200 scientists, gathered for a conference
in Menton, France, present a message to the U.N. stressing the need for
environmental action: "Solutions to the actual problems of pollution, hunger,
overpopulation, and war may be more simple to find than the formula for the
common effort through which the search for the solutions must occur, but we
must make a beginning."

1972 Economist Barbara Ward and microbiologist
René Dubos publish Only One Earth for
the Stockholm Conference. The book warns that human actions are undermining the
Earth's ability to support us.

1972 Participants from 114 countries come to
Stockholm, Sweden for the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment. Only one
environment minister attends, as most countries do not yet have environmental
agencies. The delegates adopt a set of 109 specific recommendations for
government action and push for the creation of the U.N. Environment Programme.

1972 The Club of Rome, a group of economists,
scientists, and business leaders from 25 countries, publishes The Limits to
Growth, which predicts that the Earth's limits will be reached in 100 years at
current rates of population growth, resource depletion, and pollution generation.

1972 Researchers report that three-quarters of the
acid rain falling in Sweden is caused by pollution originating in other
countries.

1973 Women living in Himalayan villages in
Northern India begin the Chipko movement to protect trees from clearing by
commercial logging, which has begun to cause severe deforestation, soil
erosion, and flooding in the region.

1973 Arab country members of the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reduce oil exports to Europe and initiate
an oil embargo against the United States for its support of Israel in a war
with Egypt and Syria. Ineffective policies to reduce oil dependence leave
industrial countries vulnerable to Iran's 1979 revolution and subsequent
reduction in oil production, sparking a second energy crisis.

1973 The Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) restricts trade in roughly
5,000 animal species and 25,000 plant species that are near or threatened with
extinction. While the treaty has a broad mandate, inadequate enforcement in the
following years allows a billion dollar black market in wildlife trade to
flourish.

1973 The Convention for the Prevention of
Pollution from Ships (MARPOL) restricts the release of pollutants from
ocean-going vessels. It regulates
dumping and accidental spills of oil, garbage, plastics, and sewage.

1976 The U.N. Conference on Human Settlements in
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, drafts 65 recommendations for countries
about how best to provide shelter. Conference participants agree that adequate
shelter is a basic human right.

1977 Indigenous protestors in the Philippines force
the World Bank to withdraw its financial backing for the construction of four
large dams along the Chico River. The effort to block the projects energizes a
global movement to protect rivers and resist new dam building.

1979 The reactor core at the Three Mile Island
nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania partially melts down and releases radiation
into the surrounding communities.

1979 The Convention on Long-Range Transboundary
Air Pollution helps combat acid rain and regulate pollution traveling across
national borders. A number of protocols have been added to this "framework"
treaty, which regulate emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur, heavy metals,
persistent organic pollutants, and several
other pollutants.

1981 The AIDS virus is detected in clinical
studies. Within the following two decades the virus has rapidly spread
throughout the world and has killed millions of people and undermined
development efforts in many countries.

1982 Mexico and other developing and Eastern bloc
countries come close to defaulting on $250 billion in international loans,
sparking a debt crisis. Lenders extend additional loans to these countries to
prevent default, setting the stage for future debt disasters.

1982 The Law of the Sea provides a comprehensive
framework for ocean use and contains provisions on ocean conservation,
pollution prevention, and protecting and restoring species populations.

1982 The UN Environment Programme organizes a
special Stockholm +10 conference in Nairobi. The attendees agree to a declaration
expressing "serious concern about the present state of the environment," and
establish an independent commission to craft a "global agenda for change,"
paving the way for the release of Our Common Future in 1987.

1983 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and
the U.S. National Academy of Sciences publish reports finding that the build-up
of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" in the Earth's atmosphere will
lead to global warming.

1984 An estimated 10,000 people are killed and
many more are injured when Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal, India
leaks 40 tons of Methyl Isocyanate gas and sends a cloud of poison into the
surrounding city of 1 million.

1985 Scientists discover a "hole" in the Earth's
ozone layer, as data from a British Antarctic Survey show that January ozone
levels dropped 10 percent below those of the previous year.

1986 One of the four reactors at the Soviet
Union's Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes after a botched "safety test"
and completely melts down. The explosion sends radioactive particles as far
away as Western Europe, exposing hundreds of thousands of people to high levels
of radiation.

1987 The World Commission on Environment and
Development publishes Our Common Future
(The Brundtland Report), which concludes that preserving the environment,
addressing global inequities, and fighting poverty could fuel, not hinder,
economic growth by promoting sustainable development: "Attempts to maintain
social and ecological stability through old approaches to development and
environmental protection will increase instability."

1987 The Montreal Protocol, which has been
strengthened since its inception, now requires industrial countries to phase
out production of a number of ozone-depleting chemicals by 1996, and developing
countries by 2010.

1987 The Basel Convention controls movement of
hazardous wastes across borders and now outlaws exports of wastes from
developed to developing countries for final disposal.

1988 Biologist E. O. Wilson publishes Biodiversity, a collection of reports
from the National Forum on BioDiversity in the United States. The book details
how humans are rapidly undermining the Earth's ability to support its diversity
of species.

1988 Brazilian labor and environmental leader
Chico Mendes is murdered by rural cattle ranchers. Representing 70,000 rubber
tappers, Mendes had advocated using Brazil's forests sustainably as extractive
reserves rather than clearing them for timber and grazing. The killing brings
international attention to the widespread liquidation of tropical rainforests
around the world.

1989
An
inexperienced crewman runs the Exxon Valdez oil tanker onto a reef in Alaska's
Prince William Sound, dumping 76,000 tons of crude oil. The spill, the largest
ever in the United States, covers more than 5,100 kilometers of pristine
coastline with oil and kills more than 250,000 birds.

1991 The Iraqi army, retreating from its
occupation of Kuwait, destroys tankers, oil terminals, and oil wells, setting
many on fire. The fighting and sabotage leak approximately 1.25 million tons of
oil, the worst oil spill in history.

1992 Bringing together 1,575 scientists from 69
countries, the Union of Concerned Scientists issues its World Scientists'
Warning to Humanity, which states that "Human beings and the natural world are
on a collision course."

1992 The Convention on Biological Diversity
mandates that countries formulate strategies to protect biodiversity and that
industrial countries help implement these strategies in developing countries.

1992 Most countries and 117 heads of state
participate in the ground- breaking U.N. Conference on Environment and
Development, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (The Earth Summit). Participants adopt
Agenda 21, a voluminous blueprint for action that calls for improving the
quality of life on Earth by using natural resources more efficiently,
protecting global commons, better managing human settlements, and reducing
pollutants and chemical waste.

1992 The Convention on Climate Change sets
nonbinding CO2 reduction goals for industrial countries (to 1990 levels by
2000). The final treaty calls for avoiding human alteration of the climate, but
falls far short of expectations, largely due to lack of support from the United
States.

1994 The World Conservation Union (IUCN) publishes
a revised Red List of endangered and
threatened species, creating a world standard for gauging threats to
biodiversity. Current versions list 11,000 threatened or extinct species out of
about 1.75 million documented species. (The Red
List estimates that the total number of species on Earth is about 13 to 14
million.)

1994 183 countries send delegates to the
Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, where they set up a
decades-long plan to stabilize and reduce population growth-a plan that
emphasizes the importance of women's education and access to reproductive
health care.

1995 Writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa is hanged
in Nigeria for leading the Ogoni people's protests against environmental
destruction of their lands by Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron, and other
international oil companies.

1995 The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of hundreds of prominent climate
scientists assembled by the U.N. in 1988, releases a report concluding that
"the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence
on global climate."

1995 Representatives from 180 countries meet at
the Conference on Women in Beijing, China, to draft an agenda to improve the
lives of women and girls. The resolution includes calls for taking action to
reduce soil erosion, deforestation, and other forms of environmental
degradation which often leave women and their families impoverished.

1996 Theo Colborn, John Myers, and Dianne
Dumanoski publish Our Stolen Future,
which warns of reproductive threats to animals-including humans-due to the
release of billions of pounds of synthetic
chemicals into the environment, many of which mimic and disrupt natural
hormones.

1997 Forest fires around the world burn more than
5 million hectares of forests and other lands. More tropical forests are burned
in 1997 than in any other year in recorded history.

1997 The Kyoto Protocol strengthens the 1992
Climate Change Convention by mandating reductions of 6 to 8 percent from 1990
emission levels by 2008 to 2012 for industrial countries. But the protocol's
controversial emissions-trading scheme and debates over the role of developing
countries cloud its future.

1998 The ozone hole over Antarctica grows to 25
million square kilometers (the previous record, set in 1993, was 3 million
square kilometers).

1999 Massive protests in Seattle help shut down
international trade negotiations and spotlight the environmental and social
shortcomings of the World Trade Organization.

2000 The Treaty on Persistent Organic Pollutants
requires the complete phaseout of nine persistent, highly toxic pesticides and
limits the use of several other chemicals, including dioxins, furans, and PCBs.

2001 U.S. President George W. Bush announces that
the United States will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, saying that the country
cannot afford to reduce CO2 emissions.

2001 The $3 billion Human Genome Project reports
that the human gene count is only about 30,000-about the same as that of a weed
or a mouse-not 100,000 as expected. News of the finding adds to the concerns
about the wisdom of current efforts at genetic manipulation, including
inserting genes into food crops and re-engineering animals or humans. (See the
upcoming July/August issue of World Watch,
which will discuss the environmental ramifications of human genetic
engineering.)

2001 The IPCC releases a new report citing "new
and stronger evidence that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is
attributable to human activities." The new study projects that at current
rates, temperatures will increase by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C by 2100.